Engineering My Faith

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on May 5, 2024. Based on John 15:9-17. I deviated from my script more than usual this week, so you may notice some differences with the podcast or video.

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The first time I went elk hunting, I did what I thought was a lot of preparation to get in shape. It turned out to be woefully inadequate. Over the following few years, I set about getting in better shape, primarily focusing on improving my endurance by running. In addition, I realized that I needed to lose weight. Trimming down the weight you carry in gear is good, but trimming down the weight you carry in fat is much better. So, I joined Weight Watchers. I’m sure there are many other current or former Weight Watchers members among us.

Why is Weight Watchers so successful? To my mind, there are three main aspects. First is awareness and intentionality. The cornerstone of the program is tracking what you eat. Each year, they change the formula a little bit, in part to get you to renew your membership but in part to trigger you to pay attention again for a little while. Truthfully, if all you do is track your points, even if you don’t pay much attention to how many points you’re allowed to consume, you’ll start developing a healthier relationship with food. Instead of mindlessly consuming a whole bag of chips, you’ll start thinking about how many chips you really want to eat. Or perhaps you’ll decide that actually, chips have a lot of points in them, and you would be better off eating carrots or grapes or something.

The second pillar is habits. The foundational habit is tracking, but Weight Watchers helps you to develop other habits, too. Habits like planning your grocery shopping ahead of time, or reading restaurant menus before you go so that you have a plan, or grabbing fruit when you’re hungry. They also encourage you to develop habits related to exercise and mindfulness.

The third pillar is community. Back in the “before” times, I went to meetings every week. At a typical meeting, everyone had to weigh in, and then we had a somewhat freeform discussion about progress and challenges in the past week. We would acknowledge milestones and sometimes talk about stuff coming up in the following week. Finally, there was a lesson of some sort. Often, the lesson would be about habits—either how to develop them or which ones would be good.

Intentionality, habits, and community. Honestly, this is a good model of the church. Community is essential to what we do. It’s possible to read the Bible or pursue other spiritual practices on your own, but a community helps you to learn and grow. The community supports you when you need it, and in return, you support others when they need you. Community is why we worship in person, why we have First Friday Out or game night or other gatherings, and why we have deacons to visit people who are sick or grieving or shut-in. Community is why we attend memorial services.

Habits. Habits control our lives. Now, it’s easy for a habit to become a rut, something you do for no good reason except that it’s what you always do. That’s a risk for an individual, and a serious risk for an organization. So, it’s important to shake up your habits once in a while, just like Weight Watchers changes their program almost every year.

Which is to say, intentionality is important. Habits enable you to act without thinking, and so they make life easier. But periodically, it’s important to bring your habits out to the forefront and decide if they are serving you or if you are serving them. Once in a while, we need to ask, Are we doing XYZ because it’s the right thing to do, or because we’ve always done it? Whatever the answer, just asking the question is important.

I’d like you to think for a moment about your morning routine. Everyone has one. Here’s mine. My first alarm goes off at 5:45, at which point I usually lay in bed and check Facebook and such. At 6:00, I get my daily alert from the Washington Post and read the most critical news stories. By 6:15, I’m up and I’ve made coffee. I check my email and read my daily comics while I bathe my brain in caffeine. When I’m awake enough, I do my daily devotion from Common Prayer that I think I’ve mentioned before. Then I go run, usually three or four miles, at least on days when I have time.

Last weekend, Rhonda and I were gone because Jesse graduated from Pitt. It was a great trip. We got to see Jesse and Sam, and Jesse’s boyfriend Howard, and Howard’s parents. On our way east, we visited my old high school friend Sharon and her family, and then on our way west, we met my mom, sister, and brother. Going both directions, we stayed with Rhonda’s parents. It was great seeing everyone, seeing Jesse and Howard graduate, meeting Howard’s parents, everything.

But you know what wasn’t great? My morning routine. Most days, I didn’t get a chance to just be when I got up, but instead had to get moving right away. If I did my devotion, I was just going through the motions instead of taking it seriously. I didn’t run. I wasn’t able to do the habits that recharge me. They refill my spiritual and emotional reserves so that I have love to give others.

As much as possible, I try to follow the Great Commandment. When Jesus was asked which commandment in the Law was the greatest, he said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” My morning routine, especially my morning devotion, is a way I can love the Lord my God and prepare myself to love my neighbor.

Several years ago, I read Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s a phenomenal book that I highly recommend. Basically, the book teaches you how to harness one of the most powerful forces available: the power of compound interest. Except instead of money, he applies it to life. If you do push-ups on one day, you’ll mostly just tire yourself out, but maybe you’ll become a tiny bit stronger. If you do push-ups every day, you’ll become that little bit stronger every day, and by improving on your improvements, by the end of the year, you’ll be much stronger. Small changes made on their own have small effects, but small changes made in the same direction repeatedly can change your life.

Many times, people say that the key to success is setting goals. In fact, when you sign up for Weight Watchers, one of the first things you do is to set your target weight. Setting goals is a good thing, I suppose, but it is clearly insufficient. When I became department chair, we did some strategic planning and identified some goals. I have been measuring our progress against them, but they aren’t directly tied to actions. For example, one goal is to increase enrollment. But what will we actually do to achieve that goal?

That’s where Atomic Habits come in. The key to success isn’t having a goal, but having a good system. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. Every coach has the same goal: to win a championship. Which team wins? The one with the best system to recruit and develop and exploit their talent. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Good systems are composed of good habits. Find a habit that achieves, say, a 1% improvement, and do it every day. Then find another. And another. And eventually, they all add up, and the power of compound interest changes your life.

So, why am I talking about habits and systems and performance improvements? Let me return to today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” He says to abide. He doesn’t say that we should visit his love once in a while. He says we should abide in it. That means being immersed in a loving system. That means having a set of habits that all revolve around doing as Jesus commanded: acting on a self-sacrificing love for everyone that God loves, which is everyone.

A habit has three main components: a cue, a routine, and a reward. For example, let’s say you want to develop a habit of going to the gym every day. As a cue, perhaps you set your gym bag by your car, so that whenever you see it, you remember to drive to the gym and do your workout. The reward, then, isn’t getting a donut afterwards. It’s the feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment you get from the workout itself.

Here’s a habit I’m developing for love. I’m an engineer, which means my natural inclination is to solve problems. That’s great if I’m confronted with a technical problem, but often, that’s the wrong instinct for people problems. So, here’s my habit. The cue is when someone opens up a little and expresses a problem they are having in their life, like something that is causing them sorrow or anxiety. My routine is to attempt to see things through their eyes and seek understanding first, and then affirm the validity of their emotions. If things veer too negative, I gently nudge them back towards the positive, for example, trying to help them avoid comparisons. The reward, then, is a deeper, more meaningful conversation than I might have otherwise had.

As an example, I was talking to someone who said they had seen me on the street while they were going to a grief support group. Rather than take over the conversation and try to “solve” their grief—which is totally impossible—I let them talk about their situation and what’s going on in their heart right now. They started to veer into comparisons with other people’s grief and how their situation is worse, and I gently counseled them that such comparisons are fruitless, because every grief is different. I expressed my opinion on the Kubler-Ross stages of grief—that they are better understood as modes of grief, with no sequence and no timeline—and affirmed that where they are right now is perfectly understandable and a step along the path to healing. When I left them, I prayed for their comfort. Overall, it was a deeply meaningful encounter that I probably wouldn’t have had a few years ago.

So that’s one habit I’m trying to develop. I need to think of another habit to add, something to do with initiating meaningful conversations. I’m not sure how I’ll do that exactly, but a workshop I attended a couple of weeks ago gave me some ideas.

Here’s a habit that we have as a congregation: When someone experiences loss or is in crisis, we feed them. This is great “spiritual first aid.” Everyone needs to eat, and often, preparing food is challenging when you are grieving or under stress. Both the giving and receiving of meals reminds people that we are a loving community, one that will help lift each other up.

My challenge for you all today is this: Find a way to abide in God’s love by adding loving habits to your life and our congregation’s life together. I have seen how much love you all have for one another and for others in the community and the world. Let’s find ways, individually and as a congregation, to put that love into action by developing habits that will let God’s love flow through us and into the community. And I am certain that if we do that, we will experience the flourishing that comes from living into the kingdom of God. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on 1 John 3:16-24.

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Are you familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? It was first proposed by Abraham Maslow in 1943 and has undergone some revisions over the years. It describes the things that each human being needs to survive and to thrive. At the bottom-most level are physiological needs: food, water, shelter, warmth, sleep, that sort of thing. Next is safety and security: protection, stability, freedom from fear. Both of those are considered “deficiency” needs. Basically, if you lack one or more of those needs, the drive to fill that lack becomes your primary motivation. Filling your deficiency needs is essential to survival.

Then come higher-level needs, categorized as “growth” needs. These are things that are not necessary to just survive, but allow a person to thrive. The next level is love and belonging: friendship, family, intimacy, and a sense of connection. In Genesis, God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone,” and so God created Eve. We are made to be in relationships with each other. We are made to be a part of a healthy family, whether by blood or by choice. We are made to be a part of a community. Our lives are defined by expanding circles of relationships: family, close friends, organizations, community, nation, and world. Although Maslow implied that we need to first satisfy our “deficiency” needs before pursuing this growth need, we can actually see many communities around the world that are living in abject poverty, who suffer from hunger and inadequate shelter, whose lives are continually threatened by violence, and yet who live fulfilling lives that are enriched by communal living. It isn’t essential to fulfill all of your physiological needs before pursuing love and building friendships, as humans are driven by this need for connection.

Next up the hierarchy are esteem needs: self-esteem like dignity, independence, and positive self-image, and a need for respect from others in the form of status and prestige. Often, the respect of others is a prerequisite for self-esteem. If you aren’t valued by others, it is difficult to value yourself.

Continuing up the ladder, there is self-actualization. That is the desire to realize your personal potential. Self-actualization needs drive people to pursue a college degree at an advanced age. They drive people to produce artworks that nobody else will ever see and music that nobody else will ever hear. They drive people to join religious orders that are focused on the inner self and spiritual growth.

That’s where Maslow stopped in 1943. Later on, Maslow and others expanded the hierarchy. They added a few needs in the middle of the hierarchy that are not terribly relevant for us. But then they also added a need at the top: transcendence. We all have a yearning to be part of something greater than ourselves. Whereas self-actualization may drive a person to become a solitary monk who studies in private, self-transcendence drives a person to service in God’s name. Jesus modeled the perfect self-transcendence, as captured in the kenosis hymn in Philippians:

⁵ Let the same mind be in you that was^[a] in Christ Jesus,

⁶ who, though he existed in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be grasped,
⁷ but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
⁸     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

⁹ Therefore God exalted him even more highly
    and gave him the name
    that is above every other name,
¹⁰ so that at the name given to Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹ and every tongue should confess
    that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

This is the self-transcendence referenced in our epistle lesson today, when John wrote, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for each other.” Jesus modeled self-transcendence and calls us to strive for it.

Later in the epistle, John wrote, “Let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.” Love in deed means putting our words into action. Often, this is interpreted as meaning that we should satisfy the deficiency needs of those who are suffering. That’s how The Mission started. Someone recognized a couple of deficiency needs: laundry and showers. When people started taking advantage of the opportunity for clean clothes and bodies, the leaders realized that people had lots of other needs as well, food and shelter being foremost among them.

If that’s where they stopped, then some of the criticisms leveled at the Mission might be justified. But in the past five years that I have been volunteering there, I have seen the scope of their services grow and climb Maslow’s hierarchy. They have mechanisms to supply every deficiency need that the patrons have, including providing a safe place to stay. But beyond that, they provide a sense of community—a place where everyone belongs, no matter what happened in their past. That love and acceptance has enabled many patrons to escape chronic homelessness. Along with love and acceptance has been teaching and other supports so that patrons can move towards self-actualization. They help people cope with addictions and help people develop independent living skills. All in pursuit of satisfying all of the needs that the patrons have.

In the past, whenever someone has mentioned that we should be doing more active missions, the response has usually been some variation on, “I’m not able to work in a kitchen any more like I used to.” As The Mission demonstrates, though, there are lots of other ways to help people satisfy their needs for surviving and thriving. For those who aren’t homeless, there are other organizations in town that provide food and other basic needs, such as GRACE and the Dream Center.

But what about the higher needs on the hierarchy? Let’s look beyond the homeless and the working poor. Our society is wealthier than ever. Between the time Maslow wrote in 1943 and the late 1970s, the average family’s standard of living doubled. If you consider the way we live now compared to, say, the time of the American Revolution, you can see that today’s working poor have material lives that are much better than some of the wealthiest people 250 years ago. Here in the US, more than 80% of people have their deficiency needs fully satisfied.

And yet, we are lonelier than ever. The fraction of US households comprising only a single person has grown from 13% in 1960 to 29% in 2022. Since 2003, the average time spent in social isolation increased by 24 hours per month while time spent in social engagement with family, friends, and others decreased by a total of more than 40 hours per month. And I wouldn’t say that 2003 was necessarily a time when we had healthy social interactions. There was a famous book about social engagement called Bowling Alone that pointed to the stark decline in social structures like bowling leagues, PTA, and other civic organizations. It was published in 2000, before the stark decline over the first part of the 21^st century and before the catastrophic decline due to COVID.

Let me tell you a little personal story about that. From 1998 to 2003, Rhonda and I live in Greenwood, Arkansas, a little town outside of Fort Smith. After five years, we had few enough friends living locally that I can count them: Tony & Becky, Ricky & Cissy, and Jason. That’s it. There were a few people at work that I was friendly with, but the family we really connected with moved in 2001, I think. It was a very closed community. Everybody already had their social networks, so there was no way for us to really break into them. People were friendly enough, but only at the level of being acquaintances.

Here in Rolla, we have a fluid enough community that it’s much easier to make friends. However, if it weren’t for joining this church, we would have struggled to form deep, meaningful relationships. Only in the past five years or so have I really ventured out to form friendships with a broader cross-section of the community.

And yet, forming these relationships is vital to human thriving. I believe that the core message of the Gospel is that the kingdom of God is at hand! The kingdom of God is a state of being where everyone’s needs are fulfilled and where we love one another, in word and in deed. There are many ways we can show love for someone. You’ve probably heard of the Five Love Languages. The book and methodology are basically pseudo-science, but at least it is descriptive of the ways a person can receive love. The five love languages are: words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch. I would say that as a congregation, we do pretty well on loving people with the language of gifts, with our financial and material support of The Mission, GRACE, and Russell House and our giving to the four PC(USA) special offerings. We do a much poorer job on the other love languages. We love each other in all of these ways, but we don’t love our community in these ways. We preach the good news. We spend time in fellowship, and deacons spend time with shut-ins. We pass the peace. But we don’t reach out into the community in these ways.

So let me ask you: How can we, as a congregation, show love to our neighbors in the community? How can we help them to satisfy their needs somewhere on Maslow’s hierarchy? How can we speak all of the love languages into their hearts and their lives?

For the moment, let’s set aside the deficiency needs. As I said, we do pretty well as a congregation supplying financial and material support to organizations that seek to provide food, shelter, and security for people in our community. But what are we doing to supply love and belonging?

Over these past five years as I’ve tried to grow my friend circle, I have connected with some people who have deep faith, some who have some vaguely spiritual beliefs, and some who reject organized religion altogether. In some cases, the friendships are kind of thin and just based on one particular shared interest. But in the cases where the friendships have grown deeper, both of us have been willing to share authentically from our hearts. Both of us have been open and honest with each other. And in that openness, Christ has been present by the power of the Holy Spirit.

In my morning devotion recently, I read this quote by Jack Bernard, a co-founder of the Church of the Sojourners in San Francisco.

The key element in beginning to learn to embody the love of God is not heroic faith and determination. It has to do with whether or not we can take hold of the love of God as a power that includes us within it. The difference is between seeing life from the inside of God versus seeing it from within my own sensibilities and capacities. From inside the love of God, suffering becomes not only bearable, but a privilege of participating with Christ in his love for the world. This cannot be rationally explained or justified, but it is the fruit of a life trustingly lived in and for God who is all love.

Jack Bernard, quoted in Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

This is the core of our calling. See life from the inside of God. Let God’s love dwell in you and surround you and empower you to reach out to others. If you do that, you may get hurt. You may be rejected. You may be told things that you don’t want to hear, such as ways in which your actions have been hurtful to someone you were trying to love. You have to be willing to work through that and rely on Christ’s promise to be with you always, even to the end of the age. You have to be willing to be vulnerable while knowing that God protects you.

This is hard, but it’s easier when you are connected to Christ through His body, the church. If you’re strong enough to start a ministry to a new group on your own, that’s great! But if not, know that you are surrounded by a group of people who share God’s love, who love you and who will support you with their prayers. But even better, try to find others who will support you with their presence and their talents. And Christ’s love flowing through you will strengthen you and amplify everything you do.

In my job as department chair, I see my mission as serving future alumni. This is a goal aimed at self-actualization needs. I believe that all students who make it to their sophomore year in electrical or computer engineering are capable of becoming successful alumni of our program. I am trying to also satisfy some of the students’ love and belonging needs that are so essential to persisting through the hard times that inevitably come along as they progress through their studies.

So who do we serve? I suggest that we strive to serve Millennials who are satisfied materially, but yearning for love and belonging. People who came of age in a time of scarcity and have focused all of their energy on establishing successful careers, only to find that a career only fulfills part of their needs. How can we do that? I don’t know, but I’m working on it, and I would ask that everyone think and pray and work together to determine how best we can share our message with the community, the message that this is a place and a community where everyone belongs, everyone is welcome at our Lord’s Table, and everyone can know the love of God. Amen.

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Preached on April 7, 2024, the Second Sunday of Easter, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on John 20:19-31.

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Today, we pick up the story where we left off last week. Let’s review. Friday, Jesus was crucified, and shortly before sunset, he was buried. Saturday, the disciples presumably honored the Sabbath, while hiding from the authorities. Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb, intending to care for the body of her Lord. She arrived and saw the tomb opened and empty. So she ran away in fear, thinking that someone had stolen the body, and told the disciples. Two of them listened to her, Peter and “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” which we think was probably John. John got to the tomb first, looked in, and saw nothing. Peter got to the tomb and went in, seeing only the unrolled linen cloths. John also went in, then, and the Gospel writer says that “he saw and believed.” What exactly did he believe? The author also says that they did not yet understand that Jesus had to die and be raised, so I guess John believed that Jesus’s body was really gone. But neither John nor Peter had any idea yet that Jesus had risen from the dead.

Mary Magdalene stayed at the tomb and wept. She had lost hope, but still had faith and love. For her faithfulness, she was rewarded by a visit from her risen Lord. She ran and told the disciples.

But did they believe her? Probably not. After all, Peter and John had just been at the tomb and they didn’t see anyone, so they probably chalked it up to some hysterical woman making things up. They gathered together and locked the doors because of their fears. If they had really believed that Jesus had conquered death, they would no longer have any fear. But they didn’t. Seeing is believing, and they hadn’t seen.

But suddenly, there is Jesus among them! I bet he caused quite a commotion! Whenever God breaks into our daily lives, a natural reaction is fear and astonishment. Angels always say, “Do not be afraid!” So Jesus’s first message is, “Peace be with you.” Christ is the source of divine peace and love, so whenever he shows up, we can cast our fears upon him and be filled with his peace.

He doesn’t stop there, though. He commands his disciples to go and do likewise. That’s why each Sunday, after the declaration of pardon, we share Christ’s peace with one another. The peace comes not from us, but from God. We are just the messengers who can help each other connect to the divine peace that passes understanding.

Jesus tells them, “Just as the Father has sent me, I also send you.” Jesus had a mission: to share the good news of God’s kingdom. He knew where that mission would take him: the cross, and then the grave. Yet in dying, he conquered death, as another step in establishing God’s eternal kingdom where we all live in peace and in right relationships with God and with each other. That reconciliation is a process, not an event, though. We are still striving to live into God’s kingdom, to heal our broken relationships, to bring peace to all of God’s people. And so Jesus sent his disciples to carry on, and by extension, he sends all of us to continue the mission.

The commission Jesus gave in John’s Gospel was first to go: Jesus was sent to Galilee and Judea; his disciples were sent to all the world. And then to forgive: “If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven; if you retain anyone’s sins, they are retained.” Some people read this as a command to judge the world, to determine whose sins are worthy of forgiveness. But when you think about it, Jesus hardly ever judged someone unworthy of forgiveness, except possibly people who were self-righteous. No, I read this as commanding the disciples to build God’s kingdom, an existence where everyone is reconciled to God and to each other. He was encouraging them to forgive one another for the sake of the beloved community, and cautioning them that if they failed to forgive one another, the brokenness would remain in the world.

This is hard work. Going forth, preaching the good news, forgiving people who sin against you: that can be very draining. But Jesus had a gift for the disciples: the breath of life. Like the wind that swept over the face of the waters at the dawn of Creation, or the breath of life that turned dust into Adam, or the breath that brought life to the dry bones that Ezekiel prophesied to, Jesus’s breath filled the disciples with new life. They thought their messianic movement had ended and their lives were in peril, but Jesus brought them back to life. He filled them with the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that moves among us today and empowers us to continue the work that the disciples began.

Well, Jesus gave the gift of the Holy Spirit to most of the disciples, anyway. I guess Thomas had stepped out to get dinner or something, and he missed it. Now, Thomas gets a bad rap, but the reality is that nobody believed that Jesus had risen until they saw him. Not Mary—she wept until Jesus spoke her name. Not Peter or John—they saw the empty tomb and ran away, and were only convinced when Jesus came to their room and showed himself. Well, poor Thomas missed out.

Do you ever feel like you’ve missed out on God? I have had some God encounters, but they were very subtle. I have a friend who had a vision that changed his life. We probably all know people who were “saved” at a Pentecostal service, who felt the power of the Holy Spirit move within them. I haven’t had visions or dramatic gifts of the Spirit. But I don’t need those to believe that Christ has risen! (He is risen indeed!) Some people do. Presbyterians are by-and-large process Christians, meaning that we grew up in the faith or we reasoned our way into faith, and that’s fine. Some people can’t access God that way and need a more tangible encounter. Christ meets us where we need him. Thomas needed to touch Jesus’s wounds in order to truly believe.

Jesus says to Thomas, Do not doubt, but believe! That’s a hard teaching, the way most people interpret it. Like many of you, I grew up in the church. Then like so many young people, I started to have my doubts. Have you read the Bible? There’s some strange stuff in there. How could Jesus turn water into wine? How could Elijah call down fire from heaven? How could the Red Sea part for the Israelites? And of course, the biggie: How could a dead man come back to life? I had doubts. I had doubts upon doubts upon doubts. The Gospel seemed like a house of cards. There were a few cards that seemed pretty flimsy, some concepts and events that I couldn’t get behind, and so the whole thing collapsed.

A lot of people’s faiths are something like that. If you subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible, you have basically two options. One, you could reject it all, because there are too many internal contradictions and contradictions with science and known historical facts. This is the atheist’s path. Or two, you could embrace it all and close your mind to all possible examples of errors or contradictions, concocting tortuous explanations of why two seemingly opposite statements are both true. This is the path of the fundamentalist, who would deny that it’s even a choice. They would say that of course it’s literally true—how could you think otherwise? They would say that if you doubt any part of it—if you doubt that the heavens and the earth were created in six days, roughly 4000 years ago, and that a man named Moses led 600,000 men out of slavery from Egypt, and everything else in the Old Testament, and everything in the Gospel accounts, then you cannot be a Christian and cannot be welcomed into the kingdom of God.

Well, eventually, I discovered that there is a different path. Doubts are real, and are the natural result of taking the Bible seriously. If you start with a literal reading and use the inherent contradictions to reject it all, then you don’t have to seriously consider its teachings and its insights into the way to live with one another. But if you do take it seriously, you can see that God pervades the text from Genesis right through to Revelation. You can see that God’s messengers taught the people what they needed to know in order to become a priestly nation. You can see that the major and minor prophets had piercing commentaries on their own societies that still ring true today. And you can see that Jesus revealed the best way to live.

You can accept all of that without believing that Jesus was raised from the dead. I’ve heard people say that Jesus was a great prophet, or their role model. But he was more than that. He was the Son of the living God, the Source of our being, the Word made flesh. He showed us how to live, and how to die. He showed us that there is always hope. He showed us that he has conquered sin and death forever, and he invited us to live into his eternal kingdom now.

But still, we doubt. I can proclaim Christ crucified and risen, and yet have reservations about the whole story. There is precious little in the historical record to corroborate the Gospel accounts, which themselves were written decades after the fact. Did John, or whoever wrote in John’s name, really get the story right? Why are there so many differences between the four Gospel accounts? These doubts and many more can nag at me and undermine my beliefs.

But that’s OK. Doubts are natural. They drive us to keep searching for answers, though each answer usually leads to more questions. We see as through a glass darkly, so there is much that we cannot comprehend. Like Thomas on Easter night, we hear the testimony of those whose faith is deep and certain. Yet like Thomas, we can stay in community and wait for Christ to appear. We can keep our eyes open for his presence in our friends, in our enemies, in the needy stranger.

Doubt everything you have been taught. In doubting, we find the flaws in our house of cards, and in seeking answers to our questions, we end up with a more flexible and resilient relationship with our risen Lord.

The Greek word in the Bible we translate as “faith” means something more like faithfulness or fidelity. Jesus doesn’t ask us to abandon our intellect or stop seeking answers. Rather, he asks us to stay faithful to our calling despite our doubts.

And what is that calling? To go. Just as Jesus was sent to ancient Galilee and Judea to proclaim his coming kingdom, we are also sent into all the world. We are sent to proclaim that God is alive, that Christ is alive, that the Holy Spirit flows in and through us all. We are sent to proclaim a coming kingdom where all people are welcome and equal before Christ’s throne. We are sent to build a community of peace and reconciliation where we all share God’s love. We are sent to forgive and to be forgiven.

Doubt your beliefs. Doubt what you’ve been taught. Doubt the Bible, doubt the Book of Confessions, doubt everything. But never doubt that God loves you—you personally, you all collectively, each person. Never doubt that God seeks a future where we can all bask in the glory of his love. And now go and live as if each one of you, all of you together, and everyone you meet are on a path that leads to that glory in Christ’s eternal kingdom. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on March 31, 2024, Easter Sunday. Based on John 20:1-18.

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I want to start by backing up a week. You may recall that last week was Palm Sunday. Jesus borrowed a donkey and rode into Jerusalem triumphantly. What exactly his triumph was at that point, I don’t know. But the people loved him and cheered for him as he rode into town as if he were a conquering hero. They waved palm branches and shouted, “Hosanna!” That’s a Hebrew word that basically means, “Save us!” It’s an expression of praise for a coming savior who is deserving of special respect. They shouted, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” The crowd clearly thought that Jesus was coming to up-end society and save them all in God’s name. This was essentially a political demonstration in support of Jesus and in opposition to Rome.

Next, either Sunday afternoon or Monday, Jesus committed his most openly rebellious act: the cleansing of the Temple. He came into the Court of the Gentiles, which was a big outer courtyard where people of every background could gather. It was a festival season, so there were lots of people from all around the Mediterranean. The Temple leaders had allowed vendors to set up in the Court of the Gentiles to sell sacrificial animals and currency that would be acceptable in the Temple. Jesus said, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” He drove out all the animals and flipped the moneychangers’ tables. Arguably, this was the critical event that set things in motion, leading ultimately to the events at the end of the week.

Over the next couple of days, Jesus and the Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and priests sparred verbally. They all tried to trap him into saying something that would either turn the crowd against him or enable them to convince the Romans to kill him. But Jesus foiled their every effort. When they challenged his authority, he lifted up John the Baptist, whose followers filled the crowd, as his forerunner. When they tried to use tax law to force him to choose a side, he chose neither the crowd nor the Romans, but God alone. Stymied at every turn, the chief priests decided to use trickery and bribed Judas Iscariot.

When Thursday came around, Jesus knew that things were getting serious. He knew that he didn’t have much time left with his disciples. He knew that if he had anything important to tell them, now was his last chance. He said a lot that evening, about who he was, where he was going, and what would happen. It all came together, though, in a simple phrase: Remember me. He took bread, broke it, and said, “As often as you do this, remember me.” Not just when we have communion, but each time we eat, we should remember Jesus, our great teacher, the Son of God.

All week, and indeed before they ever came to Jerusalem, Jesus told his disciples that he would die. He told them that “the Son of Man will be lifted up,” a euphemism for the crucifixion that he knew awaited him, just as it awaited everyone that Rome perceived as a rebel and a threat. He kept saying it and saying it, but nobody really believed him. But indeed, on Friday, it happened, just as he predicted. And as he predicted, his followers all fell away.

See, if Jesus was a threat to the Roman occupiers, so were his disciples. So of course they ran and hid. I think there was more to it, though. They had placed all of their hopes and dreams on the movement that Jesus led, and here it was coming to an end. They couldn’t bear to see the ignominious death of their leader, which they knew would lead to the death of the movement, too. Some of them probably held out hope that Jesus would bring himself down from the cross, or call down legions of angels to defeat the Romans.

But that was not to be. Jesus died the death of a rebel, the death of a criminal. All four Gospels report the Roman soldiers and centurion and governor making absolutely sure that Jesus was dead. He wasn’t just comatose or something, but truly dead.

The disciples had all fallen away. They were all in hiding. But one person held true through all of this turmoil: Mary. That was an extremely common name in Jesus’s time, and so there is some confusion about which Mary is which, plus there are some anonymous women in the various stories. But I’ve read and listened to some recent research, and here’s what I think. The one key person who moves from the background to the foreground is Mary Magdalene. I believe that she was the sister of Lazarus, and in gratitude for Jesus’s miraculous restoration of her brother whom she had lost, she anointed Jesus with expensive perfumed ointment. She stayed true to Jesus, her Lord, who she believed to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God. She stood by the cross. When all the disciples fell away, only the women stayed true, and the only woman besides Jesus’s mother that is repeatedly identified among them was Mary Magdalene. She held on through the pain and grief of Jesus’ crucifixion, with the devotion of a sister who would do anything for her spiritual brother and Lord.

Friday evening, all hope had died. The movement that Jesus had started died with him. All that was left was mourning and sorrow. You’ve probably heard of the five stages of grief. I think it’s better to describe them as five modes of grief, five different ways that grief takes hold of you. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We see bargaining in the story of Lazarus: “Jesus, if only you had been here, you could have saved my brother.” Now, after her brother had been raised, her Savior was taken from her. She was perhaps in denial. She was holding on to some thin sliver of hope that maybe this wasn’t real.

But it was real, and Jesus was truly dead. Come Sunday, Mary did the only thing she could think of: she wanted to see and care for the body of her Lord, her brother, her friend, her teacher, the man who meant everything in the world to her. Now it was time for anger: not only was she deprived of the life of her teacher, but now she was also deprived of his body. She went to the garden seeking to show her devotion by caring for the body, and it was gone! Where could it be? Why would someone have unwrapped the graveclothes? What could possibly have happened?

The waves of grief came at her as depression. Deprived of her opportunity to perform funeral rites, she did the only thing she could do: she wept. Just as Jesus had wept when he learned that Lazarus was dead, Mary wept.

What kept her in the garden? Love. The only thing stronger than death is love. When someone passes away, our love for them doesn’t die, it just transforms. Mary stayed to show her love in the only way she knew how, with her simple presence. She stayed true to the end, and even beyond the end.

For her faith, for her love, for her fidelity and commitment to her Lord, Mary in turn was blessed. Though blinded by grief, she continued to seek her Lord. And because of her love, she found Him.

And yet, Jesus appeared at a time of his choosing. He waited until the time was right. How did he know? God knows! Indeed, often God knows exactly the right time to reveal his Truth to us. Sometimes, God comes to us in our joy, in those times of our greatest fulfillment, like at a wedding or the birth of a child or a reunion with someone you love. Often, though, God comes to us when all hope is lost. When we have nothing left, when emptiness seems to reach down to our very soul, there is Christ waiting for us.

Faith, hope, and love, these three remain; and the greatest is love. Mary had only the tiniest sliver of hope, but her faith was strong. Now, we often use “faith” to mean “treating something as if it were true despite the lack of evidence for it.” But that’s a fairly modern meaning of the word. “Faith” as Paul meant it, and as it is meant throughout the New Testament, is more like fidelity and commitment and staying true to your relationship with God. Mary had faith in that sense. She believed Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of God, and she acted on that understanding. But even more than faith, she acted out of love. She clung to a love that is greater than death, and through that love, she found her risen Lord.

In the same way, we are challenged to love through grief, to love through fear, to love our God who sometimes seems absent. And if we do, we know that Christ will reveal himself when we most need Him. Just as Jesus revealed himself to Mary when he knew she was ready, Christ comes to us when we are ready to receive him. He shows up in the needy, the homeless, and the imprisoned when we have something to give, and he shows up as our comforter, our guide, and our Savior when our pain has opened us to his healing touch.

On that first Easter, nobody really knew what would happen. In retrospect, the disciples understood what Jesus had been saying to them. In the moment, though, his promise seemed too far-fetched. They thought, sure, Jesus will rise in the great resurrection on the Last Day, along with the rest of us. They didn’t understand that Jesus meant that his resurrection would come now, and that he truly is the resurrection. With two thousand years of history, we might think we would have acted more like Mary than Peter. But at the time, Peter was running scared. He had good reasons to fear the Romans and the Temple authorities. Mary may have, too, but her yearning for her Lord overcame her fears. Both of them were trying to do their best in a bad situation.

Maya Angelou once said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” Unlike Peter, unlike Mary, unlike all of Jesus’s followers on that fateful day, we know that Christ has risen. We know that he has conquered death and brought us into a right relationship with God. We know that his love transcends all of the pain and struggles of this world. We know that Christ is in each person we meet, and that actually, we, the Church, are Christ’s body. We are Christ.

So now that we know better, let’s do better. Peter fled in fear, both at the time of Jesus’s arrest and after discovering an empty tomb. Mary did better: she stayed as close as she could to her Lord, with no real hope, only grief. We can do even better than that. We can stay true to our calling, stay true to our role as members of the body of Christ, and watch expectantly for Christ to show up in each other. We can watch for Christ, confident that he will reveal himself to share our greatest joys and our deepest sorrows.

Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed!) We know that Christ’s love transcends pain, and grief, and even death. We know that we have been promised life in His name. Let us demonstrate that knowledge by following Christ, by expecting his presence in our lives, and by participating as a part of His body, the Church universal. Amen.

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Sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on March 3, 2024, the Third Sunday in Lent. Based on John 2:13-22.

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I’m going to start this morning with a little bit of history. In the earliest part of the Bible, Genesis, we read about the ancient Israelites worshipping God in a variety of places, places that seem holy like Bethel where Jacob had his dream of a ladder reaching to heaven. In Exodus, God and Moses instituted a sacrificial system based around the Tabernacle or Tent of Meeting. This was a sanctified tent, or rather, three tents nested like a Russian doll, and sacrifices to God could only be made there. After the Israelites settled in what was originally Canaan, they set up several shrines where sacrifices were made, but eventually, the Tabernacle was moved to Jerusalem and worship was centralized there. Solomon built the first Temple, and all of the rural shrines were destroyed.

A few centuries later, Judah was conquered by Babylon, the Temple was destroyed, and the Israelites had a crisis of sorts. How would their worship continue when they were exiled and there was no temple? When the exile ended, they rebuilt the Temple and doubled down on its centralized sacrificial system. What had gone wrong? Why were they conquered and exiled? Obviously, their worship of God had not been pure enough. The priests made sure that all Jews knew that worship could only happen at the Temple, which needed to stay pure.

One aspect of that purity was a set of concentric walls, with rules about who could pass which ones. The outermost Court of the Gentiles was open to everyone. In part, this reflected Isaiah’s prophecy:

the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,
    to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord,
    and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it
    and hold fast my covenant—
these I will bring to my holy mountain
    and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
    will be accepted on my altar,
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
    for all peoples.

Isaiah 56:6-7

This outermost court was 35 acres—a pretty big space in a crowded city.

Next came the Court of Women, where Gentiles were excluded but all Jews, male and female, were welcome. Next was the Court of Israel, where only male Jews were welcome. This is where the priests would perform their typical sacrifices. Next was the Holy Place where certain elements were contained like the incense altar and showbread. Finally, the innermost area was the Holy of Holies, where only the high priest could enter, and only once a year on Yom Kippur.

This elaborate system ensured that the holy places stayed “clean.” Only people who were chosen by God could approach, and how close depended on their chosen status. It seems a little strange from our modern perspective, but it worked for them.

The Temple was the center of the sacrificial system that was spelled out in the Torah and the destination of several annual festivals. There was an expectation that all male Jews would visit the Temple on the high holy days: Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot, and Yom Kippur. My guess is that only the wealthy would visit from far off places on a regular basis, but there was an expectation that those who had the means would make a pilgrimage. It reminds me a little bit of the hajj, the annual festival that Muslims celebrate in Mecca. There are very strict rules around the hajj, regarding who is allowed to come and what they are allowed to do. Similarly, there were strict rules for celebrating Passover at the Temple.

One of those rules was that certain sacrifices needed to be made with unblemished animals. Another was that an annual Temple tax was due and could only be paid using certain coins that did not have any graven images on them. Let’s suppose you’re a Jew who lived far away, say, in Corinth. How would you get to Jerusalem for Passover? Probably by ship first, and then by foot, walking a long way through various Greek-speaking Roman provinces. If you were going to Passover, you needed a lamb. If you had to make a purification offering or some other sacrificial offering, maybe you needed some other animal like a dove or an ox. Would you really bring an animal all the way from Corinth on the ship? Probably not. Too many things could go wrong along the way. Oh, and you would probably be using whatever currency was in regular use in your hometown or in the provinces you passed through.

So now you’re at the Temple and need to come up with an unblemished lamb and some currency to pay your Temple tax. Wouldn’t it be convenient if someone was selling lambs right there where you needed one? Wouldn’t it be convenient if someone would change your bad currency into something you could use at the Temple?

So that’s why there were people who set up shop in the Temple to sell animals and change money. That wasn’t a problem per se. I read somewhere that during Passover in this era, they might sacrifice 277,000 lambs. That’s a lot of animals, and a lot of logistics to deal with. I can’t fault the priests and Levites for working out a system where vendors would provide them right where they were needed.

The problem was that they filled the Court of the Gentiles. Remember those concentric courtyards where only certain people could proceed inwards towards God? The Court of the Gentiles was the only one that was truly open. If you were a God-fearer, that is, someone who embraced Judaism but was not actually Jewish, you would want to be where the action was just to soak up the spiritual energy of that place. But what if you couldn’t get in because there was a bazaar going on?

As we read the Gospels, we see that Jesus was in conflict with the religious establishment and local government throughout his ministry. Yet whenever the conflict got too acute, he would fade away and avoid escalation. His one exception was the cleansing of the Temple. This was the one time he actively sought confrontation with the establishment. He went straight to the heart of the system and challenged them. It would be like someone protesting against the Catholic church at the Vatican. The authorities would see it as something more than a protest—the start of a revolution. This was the one time when Jesus publicly embraced his messianic calling to literally overturn the systems that were oppressing His people. And it had predictable results: cleansing the Temple started a chain of events that ended on Calvary with Jesus’s ignominious death at the hands of an oppressive occupying government that sought to crush the hopes of the movement he had started.

Why did Jesus die? That’s a huge theological question that we can discuss some other time. The literal reason, though, was that he was perceived as a threat to the stability of Roman rule in Judea and the relationship that the priests had established with their occupiers. And the most obvious act Jesus made was to remove barriers between people and God.

The history of the Christian church has been one of cycles of inclusion and exclusion. In the early days, we expanded beyond Jews to include Gentiles. As the church grew, various heresies were denounced, and their adherents were excommunicated. The Reformation was marked by attempts both to make God more accessible, such as translating the Bible into everyday languages, and to control who “counts” as Christian, such as the Anabaptist movement. The tension continues to this day. Yet Jesus demonstrated what was most critical to him: removing barriers that kept people from worshipping God.

I’d like you to think about people who are either unchurched or have been hurt by the church, and what barriers we might put up that keep them from worshipping with us. For starters, we have this beautiful church on a hill that looks a little bit intimidating. Worship spaces are intended to fill us with awe at our transcendent Lord, but awe can lead to fear.

Beyond the look and feel of the church building, what about our schedule? When I moved to Rolla, I made a concerted effort to keep my Sunday mornings clear and dedicated to worship. Previously, we would often travel on the weekend, or do yard work or other home projects, or whatever. Truthfully, in those days, 9:45 was a little late for us. We would have preferred to be done with church by 9:00 so we could get on with the rest of the day. My kids were never hard-core athletes, but I know many kids are, and have games on Sundays.

Let’s think about what happens in here each Sunday. It’s a very traditional service. I wouldn’t say that it’s “high church” exactly, but there is a definite formal feel to the service. That can make people very uncomfortable. It’s like going to a fine restaurant and not knowing which fork to use. Is it appropriate to shout an “amen”? What is appropriate to say when the worship leader asks for prayer requests? Oh, and what should you wear?

I don’t have good answers to all of this. I personally like worshipping at 9:45 am on Sundays, dressing nice, and following a traditional worship format. I’m just saying that perhaps some aspects of what we do are barriers that are keeping people out.

Another problem we face is that we are Christians, and therefore inherit all of the good and bad of our colleagues in ministry. Christians are known for being judgmental. Suppose you were hurt by some church because, say, you got divorced or dared to challenge the pastor. Or perhaps you or someone you know were exploited in some way by a church leader and the congregation chose the perpetrator or the institution over the victim. Or perhaps you consider yourself a “sinner” and don’t think you would fit in with good church folks. There’s a sign at the church down the hill that says, “Come as you are; you can change inside.” I’m sure they intend it to be welcoming, but I read it as exclusionary. I read it as saying, The person you are right now is not good enough to belong with us. You can come worship here, but only if you agree to change into the kind of person we think you should be.

Or maybe, someone thinks they can’t afford to join a church. Yes, it’s important to financially support your spiritual home, but we should never give the impression that people who are too poor to give are not welcome here. The ancient Jewish sacrificial system had options: if you couldn’t afford a lamb, you could buy two doves instead. I could imagine someone making their pilgrimage to Jerusalem, then seeing the prices on all of the animals and thinking, Wow, I guess I can’t really participate like I thought. That’s at least part of what Jesus protested against.

I’m going to give you all homework again. I want you to seriously look at and think about and pray about our church and the people who we would like to have worshipping with us, and what ways we are creating barriers that keep them out. I want you to think about ways we can tell people that it’s OK: God loves you for who you are, and so do we. I want you to think about ways we can meet people where they are and accommodate their needs. I want you to think about ways we can help people experience the loving God that we know, and ways that we can truly and actively love our neighbors.

Jesus flipped tables as a prophetic indictment of the way the priests and Levites were keeping people out of the Temple and keeping them away from God. A few decades later, the Temple building was destroyed. But more importantly, a few days later, Jesus laid down his life so that God could break free of a system that tried to tame God, so that we can all be a part of God’s family. Let us seek ways to welcome more of our siblings so that they can experience the love of our risen Lord through His body, which is the Church. Amen.

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Sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on Transfiguration Sunday, February 11, 2024. Based on Mark 9:2-9.

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Let’s start today by talking about the characters in the story. Jesus, obviously. We’ll get to him in a little while. James and John were the sons of Zebedee, sometimes called the Sons of Thunder. They were the ones who, in the next chapter, will ask to sit at Jesus’s right and left hands when he comes to reign. Bold, brazen even, full of fiery zeal.

Simon Peter is often seen as the chief disciple. Simon was his birth name, but Jesus said that he would be known as Peter, for on this rock will his church be founded. I sometimes call him Rocky, which is a more literal translation. And sometimes he acts like Rocky, a little obtuse. In the previous chapter, Peter first declares that Jesus is the Messiah, and then immediately demonstrates that he has NO IDEA what that means. And on it goes throughout the Gospels.

Moses we probably all know well. He led the Israelites out of Egypt. He was the one to make a covenant with God that turned this group of loosely-organized clans into a mighty nation. Four of the first five books of the Bible are basically about Moses’s life, which ended shortly before the Israelites entered the Promised Land.

Elijah is someone that we don’t talk about too much. He was a great prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel after it split off from Judah, in the time of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. He is a major character in the book of 1 Kings. Although he was one of the greatest prophets, he didn’t leave a book of teachings behind like Isaiah or Jeremiah or even the minor prophets like Obadiah. Instead, he taught with his actions: he challenged the cult of Baal and proclaimed that Israel should worship only God. He proclaimed that Baal was in fact not a god at all and vanquished Baal’s prophets. Unfortunately, that put him at odds with Ahab and, especially, Jezebel, who sought to kill him.

Elijah fled from Israel and sat down beside a broom tree to die. Fortunately, God sent an angel, and after a nap and a snack, he was revived and moved on to Mount Horeb, another name for Mount Sinai where Moses received the Law. On Mount Horeb, Elijah had a vivid encounter with God. In 1 Kings 19, we read:

‘God said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”’

1 Kings 19:11-18

God went on to give Elijah instructions for how he was to carry on the work he had begun, and how he should recruit his successor, Elisha. We heard in the first reading this morning that Elisha accompanied Elijah to the very end, until Elijah was swept up into heaven.

But remember, Elijah heard all of the craziness of a world coming apart, like we do every day. We hear of wars and storms and earthquakes and volcanoes and all sorts of violence and strife in the world. But God is not in the noise and terror. God is in the silence. God is a still, small voice speaking to us when we can shut out all the noise in our lives.

I receive a daily email from the Center for Action and Contemplation, which was founded by Father Richard Rohr. The basic premise of the CAC is that our action emerges from our contemplation. We can best hear God speaking to us when we are contemplative, engaged in prayer as a dialogue with God instead of just telling God what’s on our mind. Like Elijah, we need to shut out the noise of a world gone mad so that we can hear God whispering to us, calling to us, telling us how to live and how to build God’s kingdom.

Let me return now to Moses. Where Elijah was pretty much a solitary figure through most of his ministry, Moses was a part of a community. In fact, he led a nation of supposedly 600,000 Israelites who escaped from the Egyptians and wandered in the desert for 40 years. One problem was that the people refused to encounter God directly. They said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” So Moses went up on Mount Sinai and entered a cloud full of fire and lightning and thunder and smoke. Moses encountered God face to face, and then brought God’s word back down to the people.

This event is best known for the Ten Commandments, the fundamental rules of the covenant between God and the Israelites that would make them a priestly people. Moses went on to dictate hundreds of other laws that governed their worship, their family lives, their business practices, and a host of other day-to-day activities. He told them what to do. But then in Deuteronomy, he promised that one day another prophet would come to tell the people more.

Well, that happened. Throughout Israel’s history, God sent prophets with messages for God’s people in Judah and Israel, or in exile in Babylon, or as subjugated people in a province of the Persian Empire. God kept sending prophets that the people would mostly ignore, imprison, or kill. Finally, God sent His Son.

So here we are back on a mountain, and Peter, John, and James have a vivid encounter with God. This is a sign of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom. Elijah had been taken up to heaven without dying; Moses had died on the border of ancient Canaan. Yet here they were alive and well and talking with Jesus. Suddenly, the glory of the Lord shone all around them. This was the same cloud that alighted on Mount Sinai and made Moses’s face glow so brightly that he had to wear a veil to talk to the people. This was the same cloud that filled the Tabernacle that first housed the Ark of the Covenant, and the same cloud that filled the Temple when it was consecrated. This is the tangible presence of God shining all around the three disciples.

And then a voice: “LISTEN TO HIM!” Now, this wasn’t a suggestion like, Hey, please be quiet because that guy is going to read a story to you. No, this was a command like a parent gives a child or a boss gives an employee. When your boss says, “LISTEN UP!” you know that means you need to listen to what they say, and then do it. Pay attention! I’m telling you something important, so listen to what I say, then get to work doing it! That was the force of the language God used with the disciples. Jesus is in charge here, so listen to what he has to say, and then act on it.

So, what did Jesus have to say to the disciples? Well, first he tells them to keep this all a secret until after he is raised from the dead. Kinda strange. But I think Jesus wanted to make sure that when they started telling people about Jesus’s message, it had some strength behind it, the strength that comes with conquering sin and death.

But the rest of Jesus’s message was something like this: The kingdom of God is at hand! That is, heaven is breaking through. It’s close to us in time and in space. It’s right here among us, ready to embrace our open hearts. And God’s kingdom is marked first and foremost by love. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love one another with a self-sacrificing love like Jesus demonstrated. Let your love be more than an emotion, but an action, a commitment of your whole self to actively care for your neighbor. Just as you do to the least of these, so you do to Jesus.

Jesus asked for our devotion. He asked us to follow him. The words “belief” and “faith” have shifted meaning over the years, but if you go back to the original language of the Bible, Jesus did not ask us to intellectually agree with some orthodoxy or accept something unprovable as fact. No, he asked us to commit to walking the path that he walked, doing what he did, loving as he loved. Jesus demonstrated that his way of love is the way of the servant and the way of the cross.

The Brief Statement of Faith that I’m sure you have all been seriously studying starts out with, “In life and in death we belong to God.” That’s the first principle: belonging. Jesus asked us to belong to Him and his community. We should identify not as Missourians or Americans or Presbyterians, but as members of Jesus’s family that transcends all labels. Then each section starts with, “We trust”: We trust in Jesus Christ, we trust in God whom Jesus called Abba, Father, and we trust in God the Holy Spirit. Faith is an action, a reliance on our triune God who we can trust every day with our eternal lives.

So I asked you last week to internalize perhaps three or four main ideas within the Brief Statement of Faith. There’s a lot in it, and whatever resonates with you is right for you. One thing that is right for me is this: “The Spirit … sets us free to accept ourselves and to love God and neighbor, and binds us together with all believers in the one body of Christ, the Church.” We are one in the Spirit, yet we cannot see that oneness because of our brokenness. Our task is to seek each day to see that unity among the diversity of God’s people.

Here’s another one, near the end and lifted from Romans: “With believers in every time and place, we rejoice that nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing can separate us. Nothing. God’s love is right here among us. God is close at hand, ready to give us that love if we will only be willing to receive it.

And yet, God is also transcendent. In Jesus’s transfiguration, the disciples got a glimpse of his transcendent divine nature. Jesus was a man who looked like any other man, and yet he was also fully divine and glorious. We can experience Christ’s presence in each person we meet. We get closer to God as we get closer to one another. Jesus chose to reveal his divine transcendence only to those who knew him best. Similarly, it is the people we are closest to who reveal God to us. We all have a hidden self that we only share with certain people. In sharing ourselves, we reveal God as well. And in forging these close, loving relationships with one another, with God at the center, we encounter God’s transcendent love that permeates the cosmos.

So listen up! Jesus taught his disciples that the kingdom of God is at hand! God’s reign is close to us in time and in space, just waiting for us. Jesus taught that the way into his kingdom is a sacrificial love that values each person for the divine spark dwelling within them. Let’s get to work now doing what Jesus commands us: committing ourselves to a life of service to God’s people through whom we encounter the glory of God. Amen.

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Sermon preached on February 4, 2024, Fifth Sunday After Epiphany, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 and Mark 1:29-39.

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Richard Bach is the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which was incidentally the source of my name. It was his first novel and a breakout hit. He is a pilot by nature and training, though, so after its success, Bach turned back to flying as a career. Eventually, he wrote another novel, Illusions. In its preface, he wrote, “I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won’t even reach for a pencil. But once in a while there’s a great dynamite-burst of flying glass and brick and splinters through the front wall and somebody stalks over the rubble, seizes me by the throat and gently says, ‘I will not let you go until you set me, in words, on paper.’ That’s how I met Illusions.”

When we speak about a calling, that’s usually what we have in mind. God calls you to do something in particular and won’t let you go. You feel a sense of urgency about it, and it becomes all-consuming. Maybe, like Jonah, you try to avoid your calling, and life falls apart. You find yourself metaphorically swallowed by a great fish, and decide, OK, I’ll do it, I’ll follow my calling.

That’s not the only type of calling, though. A more common form is where you have just a subtle feeling of being on the right path. You feel a little urge to do something, and it feels right. So you do it some more, and it feels even more right. Eventually, you find yourself on a path that is just so natural, you can’t imagine your life any differently. That’s more or less the way I would describe my calling to church leadership. I didn’t have a great vision or anything like that. I just started doing things, and they felt right, so I did some more, and now here I am.

There is a third form of calling, too, similar to what we read in Mark this morning. Jesus did some amazing things, healing Simon’s mother-in-law and many other people. So, people wanted to follow him. Simon and the others who sought Jesus didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into. All they knew was that they wanted to be a part of whatever Jesus was doing.

Whatever form your calling takes, the important thing is to act on it. Grow into it. If you don’t know what God is asking you to do, perhaps a little time encountering the scripture together this morning could help.

Paul’s calling was of the first type. He had a dramatic encounter on the road to Damascus. It took him a little while to decipher its meaning, but once he did, he knew he had to act on it. He was called to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles around the Greek-speaking Roman Empire. This was a transformational message in many ways. First, he had to transform Judaism itself. In Judea, the dominant schools of thought within Judaism were fundamentally nationalistic to varying degrees. Most Jews in Judea thought that Jerusalem was the very center of the cosmos, that historical Israel was the essential homeland, and that “real” Jews were descendants of Abraham. Out in the Diaspora, though, Hellenized Jews had a more flexible understanding. Jerusalem and historical Israel still figured largely in their belief system, but so did the local synagogue. Proselytes, that is, Gentiles who converted to Judaism, were somewhat common.

Paul was born in that Hellenized Jewish environment. His encounter with our risen Lord transformed his beliefs even further. Now, he realized that proselytes did not need to become Jewish to become a part of God’s family. Greeks did not need to be circumcised and initiated into Judaism. They just needed to be baptized and welcomed into Christ’s family, which transcends Abraham’s earthly descendants.

So, as Paul wrote in today’s passage, he lived as a Jew among Jews and as a Greek among Greeks. Between his encounter on the road to Damascus and his travels to Corinth and Ephesus and other cities around the Roman Empire, he spent years in study to determine what was essential to participating in God’s kingdom and what was only culturally relevant to being a Jew.

We could read this passage and think, Paul just goes along with whatever people want to do. He’s just some easygoing, you-do-you kind of guy, right? WRONG! Paul never held back when people were violating some important tenet of this newly-developing religion. I would not characterize any of his writings as “gentle.” He was more of a firebrand, never afraid of a confrontation.

Instead, we should see this as encouraging relational evangelism, rather than colonial evangelism. Pastor Dennis talked about relational evangelism a couple of weeks ago. Colonial evangelism is what a lot of Christians did over the past few centuries. Colonial evangelism emerges from a belief that our God is the True God, and the way we understand God is the only way to understand God, and the way we live is the only right way to live in God’s kingdom. There were some great successes over the centuries. One article I read concluded that there was a positive correlation between Christian missionary activity and the strength of democracy among colonized peoples in the Pacific. Missionaries also brought medicine and hygiene practices and many other benefits to primitive societies, and dismantled evil practices like cannibalism and human sacrifice. But along the way, some of them also destroyed local cultures that were supremely life-giving. They destroyed inherited knowledge about the best way to live in that place and ecosystem. They disrupted and destroyed the lives of children. And they paved the way for military conquest that ultimately led to the loss of freedom for millions of people.

Many forms of evangelism in America today are colonial in some sense. They imagine that there is only one right way to live and only one right way to believe and only one right way to follow God, and they insist that everyone join in. This is a major election year, so I feel compelled to remind everyone that Jesus was not a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or anything else. No political party can claim to follow God’s law perfectly. No nation has been specially chosen by God—not the modern state of Israel, not America, none. We have all been chosen to be a part of God’s kingdom. We all have different ways of doing God’s will.

The task before us, then, is to determine what is essential and what is not. Many of the members of this congregation have at some time been ordained an elder or deacon and pledged to be guided by the Book of Confessions and Book of Order. Well, the first chapter of the Book of Order states that “Human beings have no higher goal in life than to glorify and enjoy God now and forever, living in covenant fellowship with God and participating in God’s mission.” It goes on to say that Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church, who calls the Church into Being. This is essential. The portion of the Book of Order that relates to worship lays out a fourfold ordo, saying that our worship should be structured as Gathering, the Word, the Sacraments, and Sending.

But elsewhere it says, “We acknowledge that all forms of worship are provisional and subject to reformation according to the Word of God.” What that means is, we don’t have to worship in a sanctuary on Sunday mornings at 9:45 am with a piano and organ. We don’t have to center the worship on a sermon where one person talks and everyone else just sits and listens. We don’t need to have a choir. We don’t have to wear robes, or use liturgical colors for our vestments and paraments, or anything else. These are all choices that we have made. They are good choices, and they are meaningful to me as they probably are to most of you gathered here today, but they are not essential.

You know what else is not essential? “Christianese.” That’s the special language we use that marks us as insiders. I just used a bunch of it. What is a sanctuary? Well, the name means someplace holy, but we have taken it to mean a large room marked with symbols of our faith where we gather to worship. What really is the difference between a sanctuary and a chapel? We could use other words, like auditorium. What are paraments and liturgical colors? Paraments are these cloths that we put on the pulpit and table. Oh, a pulpit could just as well be called a podium, I suppose. Liturgy is literally the work of the people, but it has come to mean the words we say in our worship and the seasons of the church and things like that.

OK, those are all churchy words that you probably wouldn’t use in casual conversation. But there are others that have slippery meanings and can push people away from church. Next Monday, a campus group is having a sort of interfaith dialogue. We were trying to decide what topics would be meaningful to people from a wide range of faith traditions—Christian, Muslim, Hindu, secular humanist. One guy suggested “salvation.” I pushed back against that because there are a LOT of assumptions built into the word. “Salvation” means being saved—but from what? If a person doesn’t come from a specifically Christian background, or doesn’t accept the doctrine of Hell, then “salvation” becomes meaningless. What about “grace”? It’s hard enough to explain what grace is to another Christian, let alone someone outside of a Christian context.

Again in the Book of Order, we find that, “The Church is to be a community of witness, pointing beyond itself through word and work to the good news of God’s transforming grace in Christ Jesus its Lord.” If we want to witness to and transform THE WORLD, then we need to meet people where they are. We cannot simply serve people who are just like us. We need to serve people who need to know the God of love that we know. That means learning to see life from their perspective and speaking to their needs.

I’m a professor, so I’m going to give you homework, but I won’t be collecting it or grading it. I still want you to do it, and yes, it will be on the test, the test that our Lord will give you when the race is run. If you have a specific calling—specific people that you want to serve and with whom you want to share the Gospel—your task this week is to learn as much as you can about their perspective. If you do NOT have a specific calling in mind and you’re still searching for one, choose Millennials in central Missouri. Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, so they are right now between 28 and 43 years old. Probably beyond college and into raising families, if they followed the traditional path. Learn all that you can about what they’ve been through in the past decade and what their needs are today. Do not assume that their life at age 40 is like your life was at age 40. If you have kids or grandkids in this age group, do not assume that everyone in that group is like your family. Read articles online. If there’s a good book that you find, tell people about it. Learn all that you can.

And then there’s a second part of your homework. Once you see life through their eyes, the task before you, and the task before all of us, is to show them a path to the God that we know. The path should start where they are, and lead to a life of love and community. Just as you need to know where they are coming from, you need to know what you believe so you know where to lead them. So the second task I’m giving you is to read the Brief Statement of Faith that you should have received on the way in. This was added to our Book of Confessions when the historically northern and southern halves of what is now PC(USA) merged in 1983. It has some great stuff in it. You might not 100% agree with it all, or even understand it all. But I want you to spend some time with it and internalize those tenets of our faith that really resonate with you, the things that reflect your understanding of God, of Christ, of the Church, and of our place in the world. Maybe three or four things that are really, truly meaningful to you.

It’s time now to turn to the Lord’s Table to celebrate the Eucharist. That’s some more Christianese. If you really think about what it is we are about to do, it’s hard to understand, and even harder to explain to an outsider. I’m not sure that anyone really knows what happens here at the Table. But I do know this: Through this Sacrament, Christ is here among us, and the Triune God sustains us. Through this Sacrament, we are connected to the one holy, apostolic, and catholic Church, God’s people in every place and every time. And we are empowered to go forth and build God’s kingdom. Amen.

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